1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to securing genomic information, and more specifically relates to a system and method for selectively securing genetic coding regions being communicated over a network using web services.
2. Related Art
Grid computing (or the use of a computational grid) is a term of art for applying the resources of many computers in a network to a single problem at the same time—usually to a scientific or technical problem that requires a great number of computer processing cycles or access to large amounts of data.
In one important application, grid computing technologies enable the sharing of bioinformatics data from different sites by creating a virtual organization of the data. Specifically, bioinformatics grids allow the sharing of geographically distributed bioinformatics data. Thus, genetic research results can be stored on a local system and shared with the research community immediately. Moreover, users no longer need to know the location of their target information, but are able to access and retrieve data in a transparent manner. This paradigm is extremely appropriate for many types of bioinformatics research efforts, including large-scale genomic and proteomic activities.
Grid technologies are feasible thanks in part to a standardized network technology referred to as web services. Web services (sometimes called application services) are network services that are made available from an application server for web users or other web-connected programs. The use of web services is a major web trend for communicating data and services on the Internet. Because web services can be implemented on a peer-to-peer basis, and not just on a central server, it lends itself to grid computing.
Standardized data exchange within web services is enabled with the use of Extensible Markup Language (XML) documents. In a typical bioinformatics application, XML documents are utilized to hold important information, such as nucleotide chains and the identification of genetic sequences, which are communicated remotely to the computational grid.
While the use of web services and computational grids provide numerous advantages when applied to bioinformatics, there are several challenges that remain. One of the challenges with using web services for bioinformatics relates to security. Existing secure web service standards only provide encryption mechanisms for either specific attributes of the XML message, or the entire XML message. However, because nucleotide chains are very large, e.g., it is not unusual for a chain to comprise many megabytes, encrypting and decrypting the entire chain requires a significant amount of computational time. For example, the magnaporthe grisea genome has approximately 40 millions basepairs, and the length of a human genome is approximately 3,000 million basepairs. Accordingly, a need exists for a system for handling and selectively securing regions of bioinformatics sequences being transmitted and processed in a web services environment.